NEW YORK Larry Brown hates the New York Knicks so much, he urged one of his best friends to accept the job leading that franchise out of the fog.

Yes, it was Brown who pushed Donnie Walsh to become Knicks' general manager, after those same Knicks tossed Brown to the curb after one season as coach 21/2 years ago.

So if you're expecting bile and venom when Brown's Charlotte Bobcats face the Knicks tonight in Madison Square Garden, you'll be disappointed. Brown just wants this game to pass quietly.

“To be honest, I'd like to get it over. They're going to ask me a thousand questions, and I have a job here that's pretty challenging,” Brown said Tuesday.

“They” are the New York media – a rare species of journalist that made Brown's one season with his hometown team even more complicated. Tabloids have a knack for turning disagreement into argument, argument into rift, rift into feud.

It's entertaining, in an “Elvis' Martian Love-Child” kind of way, but it complicates things.

“You've got to have thick skin. They're going to ask you something and then you're going to read it” as something other than you meant, Brown said.

Of course, this might have been rancorous in any NBA city. The Knicks tend to be control freaks, managing the message any employee delivers to the public. Brown is unfiltered, and can be brutally blunt when a player isn't doing as he's taught.

That owner Jim Dolan and then-basketball operations chief Isiah Thomas didn't understand that about Brown underlined the franchise's lack of direction. Brown was accused of insubordination, of trying to arrange trades behind Thomas' back, of addressing reporters outside prescribed channels.

Brown continuously declines to address all that, saying there's nothing constructive in a post-mortem back-and-forth.

All that friction might have counted for little had the Knicks not gone 23-59 in Brown's only season. It was clear Brown and Thomas weren't collaborating, and Dolan sided with Thomas. So this became about money.

Brown was still owed $41 million. First the Knicks left him dangling for a month, looking for grounds to fire him with cause. When they finally dismissed him, setting the stage for a seamy divorce, NBA Commissioner David Stern brokered a reported $18.5million settlement of the contract. The shame in all this is Brown's dream job – he grew up in New York, loving the teamwork of the Walt Frazier-Bill Bradley era Knicks – became his one true failure. It was the first time in eight NBA stops that he failed to coach a team into the playoffs.

“There's never been a place that I've coached at (previous to New York) that I don't think was much better when I left than when I came,” Brown said. “I don't think any franchise would tell you that.”

What made this different?

“There were a lot of circumstances involved that I had no control over, except I was the coach,” Brown said. “If Mr. Dolan decided he needed to do better, then what can you do?”

This went beyond personal failure. Brown says New York is too important to the NBA – both in size of market and passion for basketball – to let the Knicks keep floundering. So he lobbied Walsh – a close friend back to when they both played at North Carolina – to take over when Thomas was pushed out. Brown and Walsh worked together for years, running the Indiana Pacers. Walsh is patient and savvy. He grew up in New York.